Claude struggles to cope with ChatGPT exodus
perakojotgenije
148 points
139 comments
March 08, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (19 comments)
LaurensBER
I really enjoyed using Claude but the ever changing limits, weird policies (limited to Claude Code, you can't run Openclaw, etc) made switching a very easy choice. OpenAI simply provides more value for the money at the moment.
prngl
It's funny how the false choice of American politics (Red vs Blue) also makes it into its consumerist corporatist life. That Anthropic's threadbare "limits" on government usage are seen as a heroic stand is a testament to just how far the goalposts on "ethical" deployment of AI have moved to the (fascist) right. As ever, politics precedes technology. We have Reagan's internet, we will have Trump's AI. God help us.
t0mas88
> OpenAI, meanwhile, has been attempting to quell the backlash against its deal with the U.S. government, putting out a blog post claiming that “our tools will not be used to conduct domestic surveillance of U.S. persons,” As a non-US person, that sounds far more concerning than no statement at all. Because if their tools weren't used for surveillance against Europeans they would have said so as a marketing message...
goldenarm
Still 8x less downtime than GitHub https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
baq
There’s a surge of demand for sure, but I’m not at all convinced that it’s at OpenAI’s expense. My bet is the non-swe folks caught wind the things got seriously good at a lot of boring office work, i.e. we’re seeing diffusion of AI into the wider economy.
causal
It helps a lot that Claude is just better. Codex isn't BAD, and in some narrow technical ways might even be more capable, but I find Claude to be hands-down the best collaborator of all the AI models and it has never been close.
hk1337
It's like reddit when Digg v4 happened
cmiles8
All this demonstrates how non-sticky all this tech really is. When your product is basically just an API call it’s trivial to just swap you out for someone else. As such it’s unclear what the prize at the end of the present race to the bottom is. We swapped OpenAI out for Claude and it required updating about 15 lines of code. All these guys are just commodity to us. If next week there’s a better supplier of commodity AI we’ll spend an hour and swap to something else again. There’s zero loyalty here.
bronlund
I guess you can call it «struggles», but this is that kind of struggle which brings a smile to your face :)
13415
Is there any news about how Gemini fares in this debate? I suppose they're fine with total mass surveillance ("we already do that anyway") and creating kill bots but is there any official stance? I find it hard to believe Alphabet would not make US government contracts.
stavarotti
I've largely found codex and claude code to be about the same however, codex tends to "think" harder and for longer which depending on the task, yields better results without too much steering. On an unrelated note, UI is such a personal preference that it's impossible, beyond core pillars that have been studied for decades, to say one is better over the other. That being said, I like OpenAI's design system much better than Anthropic. OpenAI products (cli and chat ui) "feel" nice and consumer focused whereas Anthropic's products feel utilitarian and "designed for business".
Lerc
It's is a fairly ridiculous conclusion to draw that these people are leaving ChatGPT because of their stance. I doubt OpenAI's actions play much role in the influx at all. A couple of weeks ago, to huge numbers of people, ChatGPT was AI. The biggest public perception shift that will have come from the DoD/DoW spat will be how many people know that Claude exists at all , that they are being unreasonably punished by the government for taking a principled stance will benefit. People have been made aware of a product, made aware that it's good enough that the government wants to use it. They have then been shown a archetypical underdog against the government narrative. That makes almost a perfect storm for gaining customers. When they actually use the thing and discover that it actually is good, They will stay, and they will tell their friends. At this rate they should be sending Hegseth a thank you card.
pgt
No one left ChatGPT over that deal: they decided to try Anthropic's Claude because the Department of War gave them free marketing.
qnleigh
I wonder if this is actually good for Anthropic. 2.5 million new customers sounds like good news for them, except these are mostly not paying customers. It seemed like they were positioning themselves to make money by selling coding agents with a subscription fee. If that free tier mostly exists to advertise their paid tiers, then this would be kind of a drag.
cedws
Codex has been feeling a bit faster recently, not sure if placebo.
christina97
We are in this fascinating stage where tokens that are nominally entirely fungible at a roughly equivalent intelligence level; yet at the same time there is huge market segmentation and differentiation in the non-tangible aspects of those tokens.
SilverElfin
Didn’t Anthropic hire the infrastructure head from stripe and give him a CTO title? I would’ve thought that would help bring stability but if anything, things have become worse.
didip
Suffering from success in a good way. ChatGPT truly lost all of its edge.
k32k
Many people I know initially used ChatGPT for awhile. Then after awhile they went to Gemini. Again stuck with it for awhile. And now are dabbling with Claude. Yep there really is no switching cost it seems. People generally want something from a model and then leave. I think people are sub-consciously forming relationships with Tech firms such that they do not care about them, and its all about what the user themselves gets. Generally there is no attachment. There's some examples of psychotic stuff but that's thankfully the exception not the norm. That's why Apple cares deeply about its brand - it doesn't want to fall into that group of firms.